Last Sunday morning something unpleasant occurred in a nice block of flats at the end of my road. At 8am the building was ring-fenced by tape and crawling with men in white paper overalls. There was also an incident room accessorised by a bunch of chirpy, rosy-cheeked Stepford 'community' police with clipboards and ready smiles, answering questions from local residents with a uniform 'Sorry sir/madam, we're not at liberty to reveal anything at the moment...'

By Monday the proverbial dead giveaway bunch of limp petrol station flowers lay on the steps of the building, clearly signposting a murder scene (and not, as I had originally hoped, Osama bin Laden's decadently appointed west London hideaway). By Tuesday, however, there was a great deal of action still going on around the building (a people-mover full of coppers parked in a side street, several squad cars, more forensic chaps and at least 10 other free-range rozzers roving up and down the road. All that was missing was a helicopter and some riot police).

But rather than heating up, shouldn't things have been winding down by now? Bored with being fobbed off by the have-a-nice-day PR policepersons and under the convenient, if secondary, pretext that it would be a very poor excuse for a hack who didn't alert her employers to a murder on her doorstep, I phoned The Observer's newsroom where, in due course, it was ascertained that bin Laden's whereabouts were still a mystery but the flats at the end of my road had indeed hosted a murder the previous Sunday.

There may be a few Observer readers resident in Surrey or Gloucestershire who imagine that murders are fabulously rare and exotic events, every grisly detail of which may be enjoyed over breakfast in tomorrow's paper. But the point I have attempted to make, albeit rather laboriously, is that murders are far from rare or exotic and thus, for the most part, not sufficiently interesting to be reported. In the case at the end of my road, the death of a Russian student in a densely residential area with a fast turnover of occupants stood less chance of media coverage than the news that a local dog had bitten the local postman. Unless, of course, the student had been young, female, pretty and, ideally, President Putin's second cousin, in which case it might have made a paragraph in London's Evening Standard.

A presumed familiarity with murder may breed contempt for the real thing among those of us who habitually consume death on the telly, neatly packaged with a plot, but the number of police officers working on my local murder case did come as a surprise. Budgetary constraints mean that even the most flashbangwallop TV murder scene is usually attended by, at best, a handful of cops with one roll of rozzertape between them, but my local crime reminded me of the scene in E.T. when the Bad Scientists turn up wearing spacesuits, smashing windows and breathing like asthmatic Darth Vaders before wrapping Elliott's house in clingfilm. In this case, then, the reality of a relatively routine sort of urban murder had turned out to be a far more distracting spectacle than most TV thrillers.

And then, last Wednesday and Thursday night, something pretty unpleasant occurred in my living room. I'm not usually given to quoting from press releases but BBC2's two-part drama Real Men was so inordinately proud of its gritty realism that I feel the need to highlight just a few of the wildly self-congratulatory statements from the production team and cast. 'This piece is drenched in truth, so it can't be exploitative,' explained producer David Snodin. 'Frank Deasy's writing may be dangerous and close to the bone but it's always truthful.'

'I tried to mirror the sensitivity of the script,' said director Sallie Aprahamian. 'The skill of Frank's writing is that he manages to make an unpalatable subject gripping. So rather than sensationalising it, I tried to film it in as factual a way as possible.' But quotes from some of the actors came closer to the truth of the Truth (which, by the very nature of fiction, obviously couldn't be very truthful at all) - not least this from Zoe Telford: 'Whether or not you agree with what they are trying to say, dramas like Real Men are exciting to do. They make a splash and really stand out.' And, let's face it, appearing in a controversial drama playing a female paedophile masquerading as a social worker looks great on your CV.

BBC Scotland's Real Men amounted to three fairly unpleasant, unnecessary and, for all the much-trumpeted verisimilitude, slightly unconvincing hours of drama about sexual abuse in children's homes. It did nothing that Kieran Prendiville's highly memorable and multiple award-winning Care hadn't done first and, arguably, very much better in 2000, but given that paedophilia is the subject every self-regarding, if not necessarily self-respecting, drama writer feels it their duty to tackle, that fact alone was never going to be enough to stop it getting made.

The plot was byzantine, there were far too many characters and the script was a clunker. In a TV drama that took itself as seriously as this one did, 'realism' amounted to solemn police officers delivering lines from what sounded like a child protection squad training video: 'The vast majority of victims of sexual abuse don't go on to abuse. But most adults who abuse children were themselves abused as children.' And then there were the numerous lengthy confessional soliloquies from the abused, in which young actors used phrases such as 'erect penis', though I'm pretty sure that the average 12-year-old in care calls an erect penis something infinitely more imaginative.

The writer was probably terribly pleased with himself for making one of the paedophiles a female social worker (Zoe Telford's character) and another a trusted policeman. But the impact of these plot twists was deadened by the addition of two suicides-by-hanging, a shooting and a great deal of child prostitution. When the police eventually uncovered the bricked-up body of a missing child from Zoe Telford's living-room, far from being moved I felt tired and anaesthetised . It was only young Harry Eden, as Russell, the kid with the key to unlock Bluebeard's castle, whose performance of quite compelling subtlety ensured I would keep watching.

Why there is currently such an enormous amount of misplaced pride and puffery about producing 'powerful', 'disturbing', 'harrowing' (according to the Real Men press bumf) dramas about child abuse is beyond me, especially given that anybody who watches television news or picks up a paper already knows more than they ever imagined they would need or want to know on the subject. Drama producers' regular and sanctimonious insistence that this subject matter is somehow enlightening is hopelessly self-deluding.

'One of the biggest questions of our time is our responsibility to children - how we protect them and how vulnerable they can be to adults. If Real Men makes us question society's role in that duty of care and our part in that, then it will have played a positive role,' said Barbara McKissack, head of drama for BBC Scotland. For the record, Barbara, Real Men did nothing other than expose the rather dark motives of those involved, which were, if truth really be told, mostly to 'make a splash' and 'stand out'. And, incidentally, there weren't anything like enough police around when the body was found.

Given the frock she was wearing at the time, it had to be curtains for Rachel in last Sunday's Cold Feet, when she was mown down by a lorry on the way to a property auction. After being cut out of her Saab (whose side impact protection system must, surely, be under stringent review even as I write), Rachel was rushed to Holby City where her husband and friends gathered in one of the NHS's (presumably secret, underground) empty waiting rooms.

Rachel (Helen Baxendale) took a very long time to go but when she eventually flatlined, in a scene with all the dramatic urgency of ER on Mogadon, the burden of expressing the collective grief naturally fell upon Jimmy Nesbitt - unfortunately given too many moist-eyed close-ups and too much in the way of breast-beating dialogue for a man whose forte is, after all, light comedy. None the less, he recovered sufficiently to lend his support to John Thomson in Celebrity Fame Academy. Rachel's very modern demise was the ultimate fantasy episode of Relocation Relocation and serves as a wake-up call for anybody currently embarking on a race to get a £250,000 house in a sought-after area for slightly less than the asking price. In which case, a fitting epitaph for her must surely be: She Died That We Might Avoid Negative Equity.